Project background
A commercial-scale indoor farming venture required a turnkey hydroponic facility capable of sustaining 6,500 plants with minimal human intervention. The client needed a fully autonomous grow environment with predictable yield, continuous quality, and remote monitoring.
Challenge
Coordinating hundreds of sensors, dosing pumps, HVAC units, and lighting zones while preserving sub-second control loops. Variability in crop types, water chemistry, and environmental drift made rule-based logic insufficient. The system had to degrade gracefully during network loss and avoid single points of failure that could destroy a full harvest.
Approach & solution
Our team designed a layered architecture: PLC-grade edge controllers for deterministic actuation, an AI advisory layer for nutrient and climate prediction, and a cloud SaaS for fleet-wide analytics. Twelve grow zones were modeled as digital twins, calibrated against real-world telemetry. Computer vision cameras monitored canopy density and leaf color daily, feeding a growth-stage classifier. Nutrient dosing was tuned through closed-loop EC/pH control with safety interlocks.
Results & benefits
The facility achieved continuous 24/7 operation with sub-1% downtime across the first harvest cycle. Yields improved 22% over the client's benchmark greenhouse, while water consumption dropped 38%. The dashboard gave operators a single pane of glass across all 6,500 plants, and alerts reduced response time to anomalies by over 80%.
